I've been trying to write about a party last weekend. My first attempt turned into yet another scathing diatribe against clubgoers and nightlife. The second attempt reads like hokey schmaltz. Generally I'll let a piece wander where it wants, but I'd really like to get this one right, get it accurate.

So I'll come back to that. The TV bastard thing will get more attention soon, too.

In the meantime, I decided to post a bulletin on Myspace today. If you're not familiar with the place, it's a giant network of user profiles. I've rediscovered many long lost friends with it. Sometimes people post stupid bulletins, so I whipped up my own take on the chain letter bullshit that pervades the online atmosphere like farts in a Volkswagon. Here it is.

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Pay attention, or I'll come to your house and brand you with white hot cookie cutters. The kind with Christmas patterns.

Do I have your attention? You don't want any festive new scars, do you?

Good. Here's the situation. It has been brought to my attention that if you fail to repost this bulletin within 1.37 seconds of reading it, the following will occur:

1. Cats will be born full grown, and all of them will be hideously ugly and suffer from lifelong halitosis. Severe halitosis. I'm talking leper diarrhea bad. Because they'll be born full grown, nobody will ever have a kitten again. No more kittens. Forever. Period.

2. Your soul mate, whether you have met this person or not, will have nightmares everytime he/she goes to sleep until he or she dies. The nightmares will look like home movies of you raping stuffed animals, toasters, tennis rackets, and felafel shop owners. Do not become an imaginary rapist. Repost this bulletin. If you fail, when you see your soul mate, that person will call the police. The charge: perverted psychological terrorism.

3. Anal prolapse. Your rectum will invert. Picture it. Every time you sit on the toilet , your dangling innards will be tickled by cold toilet water. This digestive prolapse will be a makeshift foreskin, an intestinal tail that waits for your emerging feces. You will be a disgusting freak and nobody will ever fuck you again.

4. Gangrene pimples. Not your everyday ordinary blackheads and whiteheads. No sir. This acne will be olive green, and it will cause your skin to slide right off, just like the skin on baked chicken. The flesh beneath will necrotize, turn purple and black, and birth maggots that squeal with delight. People will think zombies are back. Some gung-ho hillbilly will blast you in the face with a sawed off shotgun, mercifully ending your misery.

5. Your tastebuds will generate bile and everything you eat or drink will taste like schnapps vomit.

Take your hand out of your pants, I'm not finished.

You've all seen or read the horrible things that happen when you fail to follow the instructions told to you in Myspace bulletins.

All of them have come true so far, right? That's why you keep posting them, keeping the chain of idiocy intact, like a virtual Arms Across America project for subhuman genetic accidents.

So don't stop now. Repost this.

Remember, I have those cookie cutters and a propane torch in my trunk.

Steve:I am totally SHOCKED at what I just read. Even your protracted diatribe against chain letters outdid even Stephen King in detail of anatomy and evilness of thought that reeks of too much introspection and not enough of enjoyment of life in general. Either you have been listening to too much HAWKWIND on hallucugentic vitamins, or you just need a life, man.

If you have not figured out who this is with the depth of lingustic narrative - it's your room mate's Mom, who is the coolest mom (according to you anyway),who suggested that you would like the grand scale of Emerson Lake and Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery - but I would suggest listening to their Tarkus album first. Still not sure? She discovered Radiohead and admired your poster. Guess who?